Which Americans Are Targets?

There have been a few moments this week when questions of military force and American rights have been mixed up, in ways that are not always clear or right, let alone sensible. Over at Daily Comment, I’ve written about the Obama Administration’s rationale for killing American citizens without any proper due process. A Department of Justice white paper laying out the argument redefines terms like “imminent threat” and “capture is infeasible” in ways that make their meanings unrecognizable. On Tuesday, the Administration said it would finally give the legal memo that paper was based on to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees (but not the public), just in time for the confirmation hearings of John Brennan, the President’s nominee for director of the C.I.A., who helped shape the targeted-killing policy as the President’s counterterrorism adviser. He should be questioned very strongly about that and asked, too, about his role in our rendition program, which, according to a report the Open Society Justice Initiative released on Tuesday, involved fifty-four other countries, some of them torturers by proxy. (One of them was Syria.)

But there is another question the rest of us have to ask ourselves.

The Justice Department white paper doesn’t try anything funny with the phrase “American citizens.” There is no mention, for example, of forfeiture of citizenship—just of one’s rights. But does it need to? When we hear justifications for killing Americans the White House has decided are terrorists, whom do we see in our mind’s eye? Anwar al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico, though he spent many years in Yemen. His son, a sixteen-year-old born in Denver, was also killed in a drone strike. One wonders if the complacency about the targeted-killing program in certain quarters involves an assumption that the Americans in question are, and will always be, people whose Americanness some tacitly qualify, or even openly resent—Americans who don’t look like they do, maybe, or don’t believe precisely what they believe.

This is dangerous in more ways than one. It is the latest version of a certain American ugliness, one that degrades our neighbors and ourselves. It exposes people like the worshippers at the Sikh temple in Oak Creek to violence, and Muslims in New York to surveillance, and everyone to a diminishment of the citizenship we value. It is both cheap and cheapening.

It is entangled, too, with our irrationality about immigration, and our wanton willingness to waste the talents of young people who have lived their whole lives here. And does it even need to be said that it represents an amnesia about how all of us got to be Americans?

It is also very much mistaken. The cartoon of the terrorist who is somehow only “technically” American may exist in some minds, but it certainly isn’t in the language of the Justice Department white paper. There, an American is just an American—each and every one.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

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